


let us start again (unknit me)

by honeybeehum



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff and Angst, Growing Old Together, Knitting, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Retirement, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:27:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27553822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeybeehum/pseuds/honeybeehum
Summary: Francis learns to knit. James learns to communicate. They start again together.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 15
Kudos: 38
Collections: Fall Fitzier Exchange





	let us start again (unknit me)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [callmelyss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmelyss/gifts).



> ...who requested "Retired Fitzier, years later, and Francis learns to knit" for the Fall Fitzier Exchange! I hope you like it!

Unknit me--

all those blistering strange small intricate stitches--

shell stitch, moss stitch, pearl and all too plain;

unknit me to the very first row of ribbing,

let only the original simple knot remain.

Then let us start again. 

"Knitter's Prayer"

P. K. Page 

* * *

Francis held the sleeve he had been struggling with all morning up to the light struggling through the sitting room window. It was a grey day, the colors muted by a chilly autumnal rain that tapped against the windows, and the dim light of midday illuminated his stitching from behind, making it look like the abandoned web of an enormous spider. A dizzy, drunken spider. He eyed the uneven rows dangling from his knitting needle and looked down at the pattern in the book balanced on his lap. His lips pursed.

Getting better. Although it would have been a challenge to get much worse.

Francis heard the back door open and shut as James arrived back from his trip into the village.

“Francis?”

“In here, James,” Francis called. He could hear James shuffling around in the kitchen.

“I picked up some sausages at Mr...ah, Mr...”

Francis folded up his knitting and stabbed his needles into the ball of yarn while he waited for James to arrive at the butcher’s name. Francis knew from experience that if he provided the name too quickly James was liable to get snippy with him, but if he let the man dangle too long, he would become increasingly frustrated with himself.

“Raymond,” James finished.

 _Richards_ , Francis thought but didn’t say.

“I thought we might have them for supper tonight with the rest of that pie Mrs. Evans made.”

Francis hummed his agreement as he set his work down and closed the book.

“And I posted the order for that gauge you wanted.”

“Oh, did you get a chance to check the haberdasher’s for more yarn?” He would need much more white yarn for the project he had started that morning. Not that he was even halfway through his first ball yet, but he may as well be prepared.

“Yarn?” James appeared in the doorway, ducking his head slightly to avoid banging it against the doorframe. Francis suppressed a smile. Poor James had spent most of his naval career narrowly avoiding low beams aboard ship, and this occupational hazard had followed him into retirement.

“You asked for more yarn?”

“Ah, yes, but don’t worry yourself over it. I won’t be needing it for some time yet.”

James fell quiet for a moment as Francis packed his things away in the basket he kept next to the sofa.

“When did you tell me? This morning?”

Francis looked up at the anxiety in James’s voice. He was doing that nervous tic he had developed since their return home--feeling out the gaps in his teeth with his tongue just as he was prodding at the gaps in his memory.

“I may have mentioned it this morning, James, but really, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll write it down next time.”

James still looked frustrated, but his face softened as he saw how gingerly Francis was moving to sit up straighter on the sofa.

“How are you feeling, my dear?” James’s voice was soft with concern as he crossed the room to where Francis lay. He bent down to press a kiss to his temple. Francis leaned up into the kiss and winced as the dull pain in his side sharpened with the action.

“Hm. Bored. Antsy. Smarting more from my injured pride than my bruises.”

“Well, hopefully it is only bruises we must worry about. Dr. Morton was certain you must have broken a rib falling from such a height.”

Francis shifted in an attempt to sit more upright, gritting his teeth as his ribs protested the movement. James offered Francis his arm to brace himself against and grabbed a cushion to prop behind his back.

“Ahh--yes. Well. Fortunately my middle is well-padded enough to protect me from the buffetings of misfortune.”

“Buffetings of your own stubbornness, rather. I told you I would take care of that branch. Or at the very least we might have hired someone else to remove it. I think your days of teetering at the top of ladders are behind you, old man." James softened his words with another kiss to Francis's temple.

“I am not _that_ old,” Francis groused.

“Well, if you refuse to slow down out of respect for your own advanced age, do it for mine? My heart cannot take another scare like that.”

Francis brought his arm up gingerly to wrap around James’s shoulder and squeezed it in reassurance. And remorse--he remembered with a pang James’s panicked shout as he lay dazed and breathless at the bottom of the apple tree.

“All right, my dear,” he said, aiming for teasing but sounding more sincere than he intended. “For your sake, I will.”

James gave his hand a squeeze as he rose to his feet again, then gently but firmly pressed down on Francis’s shoulder when Francis made a move to follow him.

“No, no, you stay put--”

“James--”

“What did you just promise me, hm? You sit here and I’ll bring dinner in to you. Let me take care of you, Francis. Like you’ve always taken care of me.” James's thumb rubbed at the space between the swell of Francis’s shoulder and his clavicle.

“Yes, all right,” Francis waved him away. “If you’re so eager to wait on me I shan’t keep you.”

James laughed as he made his way back to the kitchen.

“And you can show me what progress you have made today with your knitting,” he called back over his shoulder.

Francis eyed his little heap of cobweb. “Hm.”

* * *

Francis had discovered the knitting books on the fourth day of his convalescence, after he had shuffled his way inch by agonizing inch to the sitting room bookshelf to scan the titles that had been left by the cottage’s previous tenants. He needed to do this quickly, before James came in from the back garden and discovered his charge recklessly endangering his delicate recovery by perusing the books on the shelf.

That was unfair, Francis knew. He had given James a real scare the other day, and those first few days, when he was in so much pain he could barely lift his head off the pillow, it was James’s care and attentiveness that had made things bearable.

But good God, the man could give Jopson a run for his money, and if Francis didn’t find something to do with himself he thought he would go mad. Since their return to England seven years ago, Francis had thrown himself into one all-consuming mission after another. Although he had acquiesced to the Admiralty's strong suggestion of retirement, Francis refused to rest. First it was tending James throughout his long recovery, then contacting the families of the men who had not made it back with the remains of their crews, then helping Lady Jane with the charity she had begun in her husband's memory and recommencing his correspondence with the Royal Academy. Just as Francis's interest in these pursuits had started to lag, James had asked him to come live with him at the cottage--a somewhat shabby place located on some property owned by his brother--and Francis had committed himself to the project of repair and maintenance with renewed energy. 

It had felt a bit like Francis had never stopped moving, like his life since returning to England was merely the next leg of his long, long march from the ships. Francis did not like to think of what might happen to him if he stopped. 

It was with this sense of rising urgency that Francis’s eyes landed on the brown cardboard cover and embossed gold lettering of _The Knitter’s Friend_. He took it down off the shelf--cringing a little as he raised his arm a bit higher than his body really wanted him to--and flipped through its pages. Illustrations of the scarves and antimacassars, with their delicate patterns revealing roses, vines, even fish, flicked before his eyes, and suddenly he was a child again, sitting in front of the fire lining up his wooden soldiers while his mother hummed over her knitting, the soft tapping of her needles creating a soothing rhythm. She would eventually teach Francis enough to darn a sock or reattach a loose button, but he never cared to discover how his mother and sisters could spin those delicate lacework patterns from thick balls of yarn. There was too much to discover beyond the walls of their sitting room to ever give it much thought, but now, well. His days of exploration were over, but perhaps this would give him a new challenge to tackle.

Or at least provide him with some diversion while he was stuck on his back, Francis thought as he shuffled hastily back to the sofa at the sound of James opening the door.

* * *

When Francis first asked James to acquire some yarn and knitting needles for him he expected teasing. And he got it--”My word, Francis, you’ve become positively domesticated!”--but he also got the knitting needles and the yarn, as well as James’s enthusiastic support for his new hobby. And if this enthusiasm stemmed less from a genuine interest in Francis’s new pursuit as it did from his hope that Francis might at last stay put during his recovery, Francis chose magnanimously to make no comment.

And so Francis learned to cast on, to stitch, and to slip a stitch. He spent an only mildly frustrating afternoon mastering the pearl stitch and an evening locked in such a heated battle with the round that James very wisely retreated behind the covers of a novel until it was time for bed.

It wasn’t long before he had mastered enough of the basics to graduate to patterns. Francis’s first antimacassar almost looked like the image provided in _The Knitter’s Friend_ , so he considered that a success. His attempt at the second antimacassar pattern was slightly better. As was his attempt at the third. And the fourth.

“How many varieties of antimacassar could there possibly be?” James wondered as he watched Francis drape the latest addition to their growing collection over the back of the rocking chair in the corner. Every piece of furniture in their small sitting room was adorned with the fruits of Francis's labors, so one could track his progress by standing in the middle of the room and pivoting on one’s heels in a clockwise direction, to see a timeline of mulish determination in the face of puzzling directives and clumsy fingers.

“Whoever left the book must have known you were coming,” Francis retorted as he stepped back to cast a critical eye over his handiwork. “Couldn’t stand the thought of you getting the cushions greasy with that concoction you put in your hair every morning.”

James sniffed in mock offense. “Retirement is not an invitation to let one's standards slip, Francis. I like to think that I offer an example of excellent personal grooming for my more slovenly companions to live up to. Whoever they may be." 

Francis barked a laugh as he eased himself back down into his chair next to the fireplace. He was glad that James could talk about his retirement so easily now. It had been a sore point with him for years, although he had known as well as Francis had that it would have been impossible for him to continue his naval career.

Perhaps it was the scurvy, that had whittled away muscle and fat and had turned him into a shade of the man he had been at the start of the expedition, that had also carved into his mind and caused the memory problems that bedeviled him to this day. Perhaps, as Harry Goodsir argued, it was the lead that had contaminated his mind and made the words slip from his grasp when he reached for them. Or perhaps it was, as Francis sometimes thought, the horror of the great white nothing itself, the soul’s attempt to protect itself from the recollection of those final months, when it had been brought to the very edge of eternity out there on the ice.

Whatever it was, it had brought James’s career to a premature end.

 _Are you happy here?_ Francis would sometimes wonder, in his darker moods, when the specters of his last, greatest failure seemed to hang about the cottage with such a suffocating weight he knew James could feel it, too. _Would you be with me if you could be anywhere else?_ He would almost ask, when James was having a bad day, when the words he needed slipped like ice melt from his mind and he snapped at Francis in frustration.

Francis came back to himself with the sensation of James’s slippered foot nudging his shin.

“Francis?” His voice was gentle. “Are you alright?”

Francis managed a smile. “Just thinking about my next project. I must admit I’ve begun to grow tired of antimacassars.”

“I suppose we are running out of places to put them,” James mused, casting his eye about the room, and the overstuffed cushions bedecked with white yarn like buns topped with icing.

“Hm. I’ll think of something,” Francis said. And as James pulled his chair up closer to the fire and stretched his hands out to feel its warmth, Francis realized what he would make next.

* * *

This was how Francis found himself, now, woefully inspecting the strands of what was supposed to be the hem of a gansey. The battered copy of _Ladies' Work for Sailors_ that he was consulting stressed the importance of close stitches to ensure that the garment be “beautifully warm,” but there was a bit too much daylight peeking through the stitches for Francis’s liking.

He huffed in frustration and immediately cringed as the movement pulled at his bruised ribs. This whole endeavor was ridiculous, he thought miserably, gazing around the room to take in the paltry fruits of his labors dangling from the furniture. He had been so impressed with his progress with the antimacassars last night that making the leap to a man’s jumper did not seem beyond his reach--it was simply a matter of perseverance, was it not? But wrangling the thick strands of yarn between three needles had turned out to be more of an ordeal than he was ready for, and he let the tangled mess drop to his lap in defeat.

He gazed out the window into the front garden, where James was breaking up the branch that he had cut down that morning--the same branch that Francis had been wrestling with when he lost his balance and crashed to the ground below. It wasn’t so long ago that Francis could clamber up the mast of a pitching ship with sure feet and steady hands to sight the horizon with his spyglass. Now look at him. Lain low by a ladder.

James was now snapping the thinner branches into pieces and tossing them into piles. He had been having a good day, and had remembered the wool when he went into town earlier that morning. Although the day was chilly, his face was flushed with exertion and he had rolled up his sleeves.

When had James lost the gansey? Francis remembered James bent over charts or leaning back in his chair after dinner, wearing the warm woolen jumper under his vest. He still had it when they began the long walk out, Francis was sure. That terrible night Morfin died, he remembered pushing up the sleeve to check that James hadn’t been cut or burnt by the lamp exploding in his hand.

He hadn’t been wearing it when he and the other officers had liberated Francis from Hickey’s camp. He wasn’t wearing it a few days later, when he fell onto the sun-warmed stone. _Too hot._

Francis cut off that line of thought before he became overwhelmed by the memories of the following days--the cries, the delirium, the building fever. Francis had to leave so much of himself on the shale, but James--

James swung open the door and stepped inside, stamping his feet on the mat and toeing off his muddy boots.

\--James he had been permitted to keep.

James smiled at Francis as he sat beside him on the sofa.

“How goes the knitting today?”

“How does it look?” Francis sighed, letting the mess dangle from his finger before James’s sympathetic gaze.

“Oh dear. Have we moved on from the antimacassars, then?”

“We are trying. I had the idea--” Francis cut himself off with a laugh. “Oh, it’s stupid. Never mind.”

“What, stupider than a fifth antimacassar? Impossible.” James was grinning at him impishly as he gently rubbed Francis’s knee. Despite himself, Francis found himself laughing in earnest before immediately sucking in a breath as his ribs protested. 

James winced in sympathy but wouldn’t be deterred. “Why are you so shy about your knitting, suddenly?”

Francis sighed again. “It was supposed to be a surprise. I had wanted to knit you a gansey--to replace the one you had on the expedition.”

Francis smiled ruefully at James and picked up his knitting once more. “But I think I was a little premature in adding this to my repertoire.”

James was staring at the uneven stitches hanging from the needles with a small crease between his brows. When he spoke, the words came slowly.

“A gansey...I had one on the expedition?” His eyes had taken on a far-away cast; although he was still gazing at the white wool in Francis’s hands, he was seeing something entirely different. The white of the snow, perhaps. The white shale. The white sky, that pressed down upon them without pity. “I suppose I must have.”

Francis gathered up his knitting with a brusqueness, breaking the spell that had settled upon James.

“Never mind. As I said, it was stupid.” He put needles, wool, and all in the basket at his feet.

James blinked at Francis and offered him a sad smile. “I am sorry, Francis--”

“Don’t be.”

“It was a lovely idea. I wish…” James trailed off, and Francis was just about to wave off any further expressions of sympathy when he realized that James was working his way toward something. His mouth worked as he put his thoughts in order.

“You know so much of that time is lost to me," James began. "The beginning is clearer to me, I think, but the later years, and then the walk out…” He shook his head.

“There are so many blank spots in my memory. I will remember a conversation we had at the cairn, and then I will remember the creature attacking our camp and I know there are things that must have happened between one moment and the next, but they just won’t come to me. It doesn’t even feel like they are hidden, they simply are not _there_. Like they’ve been surgically removed. I try to arrange these moments in my mind, try to create a coherent story, but every time I think I’ve managed it you will say something or Harry will write something and I realize there is still more missing--pieces that I’ve forgotten I’ve forgotten.”

“James, I am sorry." Francis's voice was rough. "I didn’t realize--”

“No, no. Francis.” James grasped Francis’s hand. “I do not tell you this to make you feel guilty. I am trying to explain. And to apologize--”

“Apologize!”

“--because you have suffered more than any man should. You suffer still--I see it. And the one person who might share this burden with you, who lived through this alongside you and might understand what it is you have suffered, can only remember the merest pieces of what happened.”

James’s voice had grown thick and he blinked against the wetness in his eyes. “I am sorry, Francis. I wish I remembered.”

Francis drew James toward him, and James rested his head on his shoulder with a watery sigh. They sat in silence for a few moments before Francis spoke.

“Don’t ever apologize for forgetting, James. My memories of that time have begun to fade, too. It is a blessing--to leave behind some of the horrors that we saw there. I could never begrudge you that.”

Francis shifted so that he could look James in the eye. “And of course you ‘ease my burden’--I thank God every day I have you by my side. Imagine--how would I have ever taken care of that branch without you?”

Francis leaned over to kiss the laughter from James’s mouth. When they parted, the lines around James’s eyes had softened and a smile lingered on his lips.

When Francis finally finished his next project--a white, gossamer-light shawl with only a few missed stitches dotted throughout the pattern--and wrapped it around James’s shoulders, James looked at him and smiled that same loving smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell I don't know how to knit? I am teaching myself crochet, though, so I think I feel Francis's frustration. 
> 
> I had way too much fun looking at Victorian knitting manuals for this story. You can check them out [here.](https://archive.org/details/victorianknittingmanuals) I couldn't find a Victorian pattern for a gansey--the books on knitting for fisherman mostly just stick to hats and gloves--but checking out [@knit-the-terror's](https://knit-the-terror.tumblr.com/) pattern for JFJ's gansey was super helpful. You can find their beautiful pattern [here.](https://knit-the-terror.tumblr.com/post/186618052506/the-jfj-sweater-a-pattern-and-tips-for)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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